People in the fashion and lifestyle-driven industries often struggle to communicate their ideas with each other in an efficient and safe manner. The increase in the usage of electronic communication, such as, for example, electronic mail (e-mail) has somewhat helped their communication efforts. However, traditional e-mail is not catered to the fashion and lifestyle-driven industries where a lot of the information transmitted is visual information, such as pictures. This is because the application generating the pictures is separate from the e-mail application used for their transmission. Thus, the pictures are generally transmitted by the e-mail application in the form of an attachment.
The use of e-mails with attachments is undesirable for various reasons. First, any comment in the body of the e-mail about an attached image is separate from the attachment itself. This makes it difficult to maintain multiple comments received about the image correlated and organized with the image. Furthermore, people receiving an image attachment and responding with a comment on the image may not reattach the image to the responding e-mail, leaving it to the recipient to figure out which images go with which e-mails.
Second, some company networks do not allow employees to receive e-mails that contain attachments. Employees in such situations may have to utilize other mechanisms for receiving the attachments to which comments are desired.
Third, when changes are made to a presentation, it must generally be reattached to an e-mail and retransmitted to ensure that all recipient have the latest version of the presentation. During a development phase where there may be constant feedback and modification to the presentation, such retransmission of attachments puts a strain on a company's bandwidth.
Finally, there is currently no mechanism to prevent a person receiving a picture in the form of an attachment from reproducing and forwarding the attachment to others. Thus, the author of the picture runs a risk that this or her copyright rights for the picture may be violated by providing the picture in an attachment.
Current e-mail technology, even without attachments, also does not provide an efficient way to track comments about a given topic. A receiving person needs to make sure that the most recent e-mail about the topic is opened to make sure that he or she has the most recent comments. Also, when comments are transmitted concurrently by different people, the recipient generally has to open multiple e-mails to make sure that all of the comments are reviewed.
Traditional electronic mail, therefore, is difficult and frustrating to use for designers, suppliers, and retailers in the fashion and lifestyle-driven industries. Accordingly, what is desired is a visual communications tool catered to the fashion and lifestyle-driven industries where a majority of the information being communicated is visual information, and where there is constant feedback about the visual information that needs to be tracked and correlated to the visual information.